Making sense of reading: Logics of reading in the institutional environment and the classroom

Since the early 1980s, California schools have been the site of tremendous reform energy focused on changing the way that children are taught to read. Three successive movements seeking to redefine what constitutes “good” reading instruction have gained prominence in the profession, become part of state policy, and been carried into schools by professional development providers and instructional materials. How do teachers make sense of these changing ideas and how, if at all, do they change their teaching? This study uses early-grades reading instruction in California as a critical case to explore the relationship between changing ideas about appropriate instruction in the environment and teachers' classroom practice. It draws theoretically from organizational sociology, specifically institutional and sensemaking theory. The study uses an embedded, cross-case design that focuses on the experiences of teachers in two elementary schools. It employs both historical and cross-sectional approaches, relying primarily on interviews, observations, and archival research.; The study traces changing ideas about appropriate reading instruction in the environment since 1983, identifying four major “logics” of reading instruction. It shows that new logics emerged in the environment as actors from different sectors made physical and rhetorical connections with one another, mobilized resources, and interacted with governance structures to create legitimacy for particular sets of ideas and practices. The relationship between these logics and teachers' classroom practice was mediated by the nature of teachers' connections to the environment, teachers' sensemaking processes, and teachers' location in their career trajectory. First, teachers' connections to logics were related to the mechanisms by which a given logic moved through the environment and the way a given teacher was situated in the field. Second, teachers made sense of these messages by drawing on pre-existing beliefs and practices. This sensemaking process was shaped by teachers' sensemaking about messages in the past, their interaction with colleagues, the conditions for sensemaking in their school, and the nature of the message itself. Finally, teachers' patterns of response changed over time depending upon their place in the course of their career as they shifted from building their practice to refining and stabilizing it.